I’ve had a cluster running Rocks 6.2 (Sidewinder) for a few months and it has been working well. I recently had a request to add a new user, so I created the account with a minimal useradd command specifying only the comment, the uid, the group and the username, then I ran the ‘rocks sync users’ command which copies various files, including /etc/passwd to the nodes and restarts some daemons.

A few hours later the user got back to me to say his jobs were queued, but not running. So I used the checkjob command to what the problem was, and found that his uid was unknown on the node. Indeed looking at the password file on the node, I saw that his account was not there. So I rebooted the node, and ran rocks sync users again, with no joy. So I set the node to rebuild on boot and rebooted it, and it came up with no user accounts at all.